Tell me about color filters

[BetterSense]

I'm a noob photographer and I never gave white balance any thought. But when I use color print film for snapshots and shoot indoors in tungsten light, everything is orangey. Under fluorescent light sometimes it's greenish. I've come to realize that maybe you can cancel these things out with filters, if you were willing to sacrifice the speed, but I've never tried, since I have no filters. What are the most useful color filters and what kind of situations should they be used in, or what kind of effects can you get? I've heard about people that use yellow filters with B&W too, because it supposedly increases contrast.

[Bob-D659]

Try here, lots to read and learn.

http://www.schneideroptics.com/info/...hotography.htm

[mpirie]

The use of filters in colour photography tends to be for the correction of colour temperature. Normal "daylight" film is tuned to respond to a colour temperature of around 5500 degrees Kelvin (which equates to midday in Washington on the longest day if my memory serves me right). If you were in this situation, you shouldn't need any correction filters.

Indoor lighting (although it looks "white" to our eyes) is not white as far as the film is concerned. Tungsten filament lamps have a temperature of around 3200 degrees Kelvin, so you can see that there will be a difference of 2300 Kelvin. To correct this situation, you would use a "tungsten to daylight conversion" filter (normally called 80a/b/c). Flourescent indoor lighting has a different temperature again, and yet another filter (FL/Day) would be required. The same applies to mercury and sodium (street) lamps.

Of course, there are (or were) tungsten tuned films which, if you used indoors needed little or no correction, but if you took them outdoors, the resulting blue cast would be horrendous.

Many of the casts on your print film can be partially removed during printing, but it's better to do the correction at the taking stage because the relationships of the other colours is retained. If you try to filter our casts during printing, you affect all the other colours too.......and usually with poor results.

The filters used in B&W photography are used to modify the response of panchromatic (sensitive to most colours) film. The normal filters (yellow, green, orange, red) will cut back on the transmission of their complimentary colours, so example a red filter will cut the amount of blue getting through to the film, thereby underexposing it and making a blue sky darker.

Mike

[Ralph Javins]

Good morning, BetterSense;

Two publications recommended are the Kodak book on filters and the books and pamphlets published by Tiffen. Ira Tiffen also provided some of the commentary in the later Kodak books on filters.

[tiberiustibz]

You need to convert the tungsten balanced light to daylight. There is more red and less blue and similar green. You have to block both the red and the green down to the blue levels, which means you lose a stop and a third. Your 400 speed film becomes ASA 160. The only tungsten balanced film available is the 64T slide film, which is quite slow.

[Puma]

Which KR and KB filters do I really need?
Where can I find a Kodak value to mired value conversion chart?

Thank you,

Puma

[Leigh B]

Flourescent indoor lighting has a different temperature

A common mis-conception.

Color temperature is ONLY the ratio of red to blue light. It knows nothing about green.

The problem with fluorescents is that they exhibit excess green as compared with the spectrum of "hot" lights like tungsten or the sun. The only solution to this problem is to use a magenta filter (which is minus green), or a filter specifically designed to correct the excess green.

- Leigh

[Lee L]

Color temperature is ONLY the ratio of red to blue light. It knows nothing about green.

This is not an accurate statement. Color temperature is based on the color content of a continuous spectrum (with a relatively smooth curve) emitted from a theoretical 'black body' at a given temperature in Kelvin. This spectrum does contain green light, and the emitted spectrum contains different ratios of short (blue) vs. long (red) wavelengths and all the wavelengths between them as the temperature rises or falls.

One of the problems with fluorescents is that their color spectrum has large spikes of certain colors depending on the phosphors used to coat the tube, often giving them a disproportionately greater green content (a 'spike' in the power spectrum) relative to black body radiation.

See the Wikipedia entry on color temperature, and especially the section on spectral power distribution near the end of the entry.

Modern flourescents are assigned color temperatures that are generally accurate in character, but the phosphor 'spikes' can cause them to be off somewhat from what you'd expect from black body spectral content.

Lee

[Leigh B]

Yes, color temperature is by definition the spectrum of a black body heated to the specified temperature.

However, its measurement is accomplished by analyzing the red and blue components of the spectrum with absolutely no regard to green.

That's why color temperature meters like my Gossen Color Pro 3F give two readings, one for the color temperature and one for the green component.

The magnitude of the green component of a black body radiation curve can be inferred. Fluorescent lights do not have an emission spectrum that conforms to the black body model.

I'm quite familiar with spectral distribution, thank you. I used to teach color theory.

- Leigh

[2F/2F]

I just made a post in a similar thread: http://www.apug.org/forums/forum40/9...ally-need.html.